Discussion Topic

"Suppose that "stuff" sends up the signal for the "I" in one's consciousness to make a decision and enjoy the sensation of free will? "

There's no 'other' place to 'send' such a signal. If consciousness IS a person experiencing those signals, then the deed is already done. That is to say, the decision has already been made, and one experiences the final result of that decision (slightly) after the fact.

Ie, the last thing the avalanche does is wipe out your cabin at its base.

Not all philosophies consider subjectivity to be some kind of hermetically sealed box that you can't get out of. (Randisi)

Thanks for that. Tatiana and Krista Hogan appear to leak into one another. Probably no one knows exactly how someone else is feeling, but most people have a degree of empathy. Actors talk about being in character for a role, and trying to think and feel like the character in order to behave like the character.

Come to think of it, after a brief look at Michel Serres, a tranlsator would be especially attuned to what we call subjectivity. Trying to translate evocative prose from one language to another would require a sense of what the author is trying to say, not just what they did say, it seems. Words are so context-sensitive. Machine language translation is difficult to implement because of how much of culture one needs to know and understand.

I barely know Kant and almost certainly misunderstand him, but I thought he figured most of "reality" was in some realm apart from time & space (noumenal) & notions of "mind" would therefore be exclusively "phenomenal" & somewhat of an illusion.

I don't suppose it truly matters, but they say physics is coming round to the idea that time and space don't exist -- at least at certain scales & energy levels.

I barely know Kant and almost certainly misunderstand him, but I thought he figured most of "reality" was in some realm apart from time & space (noumenal) & notions of "mind" would therefore be exclusively "phenomenal" & somewhat of an illusion.

Randisi: Not all philosophies consider subjectivity to be some kind of hermetically sealed box that you can't get out of.

Get out of your consciousness, and tell us what that's like. I think you'll find yourself in a place that Largo has been attempting to point to.

There is no philosophy needed to experience consciousness. The compulsion to explain consciousness, when it's right in front of you, is sort of like explaining the taste of sugar or explaining the experience of climbing. What's the purpose or the use? The only point is to simply experience another experience. It's all experience.

You like philosophies, don't you, my friend? I think you're getting yourself all balled-up in thoughts and concepts, which is surely itself an experience, but it tends to fall into a weird regress, like Alice in Wonderland. Philosophies are rabbit-holes, but people like them because they think they can pin something down with them. Nothing can be pinned down.

MH2: Trying to translate evocative prose from one language to another would require a sense of what the author is trying to say, not just what they did say, it seems. Words are so context-sensitive.

Look up "literary theory." This field of study has exploded and fragmented over the past 50 years, and it's very difficult to keep track of what folks are saying. One thing is for sure, though: any text (to include this one) is highly problematical, even to an author who writes it. See Derrida's works.

Once you see that language presents a constant movement of differences--of words referring to other words definitionally and in opposition to one another--you will see that there can be no stable resting point. This means you can no longer appeal to reality as a refuge independent of language. Everything in reality is unstable and ambiguous, both of which are inherent in language.

You like philosophies, don't you, my friend? I think you're getting yourself all balled-up in thoughts and concepts, which is surely itself an experience, but it tends to fall into a weird regress, like Alice in Wonderland. Philosophies are rabbit-holes, but people like them because they think they can pin something down with them. Noting can be pinned down.

Mike, you are an absolutist, a true believer. No doubt. Which is funny coming from someone based in a Cartesian worldview.

You have found the truth, have you? Nothing can change your mind?

Such people are dangerous.

For someone who doesn't like or trust concepts or philosophies, you sure use a lot of them. Didn't you just cite Derrida?

Well it's not at all clear what sentience is, and while you can try to eliminate various approaches to it, you may be wrong.

I say: People may be and often are totally wrong about their INTERPRETATION of sentience, but when someone practices no-mind meditation, for example, and is deep in the experience, there is no way to be wrong or right or otherwise. You simply ARE. Value judgments per right and wrong occur only when the discursive mind posits an interpretation or evaluation.

Ed said: In some ways, understanding sentience from a scientific point of view would mean being able to produce it.

I say: My friends at Caltech thought so as well, and despite Healyj’s wonky statements to the contrary – that anyone trying to program sentience is on bong water – this has been the promise of many AI folks for decades, and the BRAIN project which that charlatan hustled 1 billion Euros for promised as much by 2020.

Ed said: If your contention is that sentience is not something definable, then there is no test, and there is no point in trying to build a scientific theory of it. This would be true even if sentience is "emergent" since you still have to define that state in order to see if you produced it.

I say: This is not strictly true IME. What people are discovering is that sentience itself is not definable in strictly physical terms because what you end up trying to define are physical functions, the awareness of subjective experience. Claiming they are the same things is not helpful because when you go to define sentience – which Healyj says I never bothered doing, though I tried – you end up with terms that are not objective but subjective. So the hope is to define the objective functions off of which sentience is said to emerge and to create it that way. But when my friends looked at what would be involved to “produce” it, merely as a theoretical exercise, what they found is that neurobiologists et al had themselves often used subjective or meta terminology like “core self” and so forth, or considered sentience as a consequence of a panoply of functions involving memory, sensations, etc., none of which lent themselves to the code. Wish I had more time to go into this but I have a writing symposium to teach here in Carbondale so I gotta get cracking on that.

Ed wrote: Another issue for "consciousness" or "sentience" is the common experience that there is an earliest time that marks our own awareness of those states. we are not aware of being conscious while in the womb, or at birth, or anytime before 2 or 3 years of age...

where is "consciousness" then? where "sentience"? how does it come to be?

I say: My sense of it here is that our provisional ego “I” is really what you are talking about here, because you are saying some thing is coming into awareness, and sentience is not a thing but the awareness itself. And without some subjective experience with this material, this will not add up.

For the record, I said that sentience is the dynamic interplay or raw awareness, focus and attention. And that we DO NOT have free will over the content that arises in our Q Space (field of awareness), but rather we do, to lesser and greater degrees, have some free will per where we place our attention, and that greatly determines what plays out in our lives.

Sure, I use concepts all the time. One cannot talk without them. However, I don't take them very concretely or seriously. it's just talk, you know?

As for being someone (me) who is purportedly dangerous, you might want to reconsider. You don't strike me as a fascist. (It seems those folks are always concerned about dangerous people who fall outside of the mainstream.)

It's not a Cartesian point of view, btw. It's a dharma point of view. :-) How much truth can one claim if one claims that nothing can be claimed?

Thanks to PSP for his very simple and clear explanations, including his comparison of Buddhism and Christianity in their results.

I do agree that psychoanalysis often fails to produce any kind of transformation. Especially in academia we have all met people who have been in analysis for 20+ years and can describe their pain and the source of it in minute detail but never get beyond that.

On the other hand, I don't believe we can just will away serious trauma and to say so sounds dreadfully like an Ayn Rand version of psychology. Such a view it seems to me, can only be espoused by someone who has never suffered serious trauma in their life.

Think of a soldier returning from combat with PTSD. Do you really think it's useful or true to say that if he wills it he can turn off the nightmares and that not being hyper alert is a choice, that when he hears a car backfire, it is a choice to not hit floor but just go with the flow?

And where is the empathy for people who are suffering? It's all well and good for those of us with comfortable lives and interesting work to hypothesize abstracts, but what about those less fortunate?

I certainly don't know... but the point about philosophy "making progress" since Kant has been vigorously challenged by Brian MaGee, a now elderly former associate of Bertrand Russel and Karl Popper.

He suggests all of analytic philosophy is bunk & merely about analyzing language -- the tools of philosophy-- rather than making progress with philosophy. Says Popper mostly just revived some ideas from Hume. Says Wittgenstein was a Kantian & utterly misunderstood & not very significant.

Heidegger (it seems to me) was more about describing than explaining, & has certainly been restated in obfuscatory ways, by lots of writers since.

. . . we do, to lesser and greater degrees, have some free will per where we place our attention (JL)

It seems to me that once one accepts a deterministic path (in the sense that choices are made at some lower level of consciousness) it might be hard to deviate to encounter free will. A few simple examples might clarify your comment, John.

For the record, I said that sentience is the dynamic interplay or raw awareness, focus and attention. And that we DO NOT have free will over the content that arises in our Q Space (field of awareness), but rather we do, to lesser and greater degrees, have some free will per where we place our attention, and that greatly determines what plays out in our lives.

First, I say that subjective experience can be replicated. Experience is subjective only because humans do not perfectly experience many very objective and definable events. If we were perfect tape recorders, it would not be subjective.

We can't remember everything in our field of vision, for example. We cannot absolutely recall everything that our eyeballs experienced at one instant.

Same goes with all of the other senses. Our brains can't (or refuse) to perfectly record every "pixel" of experience. My guess is that the mind is constantly filtering experience to decide what to keep and what to ignore. If you put these rules in place it would help. Understanding intelligence is a little tricky. So far we have only one species to study. Ourselves. If we were able to communicate with other sentient species on our planet (whales, for example), then we might see more than one way to get there.

We can get close, though, and the most fruitful path to knowledge has typically been gained by a detached, physical analysis, of a part of experience or thought.

Sorry, but religion and spiritism haven't contributed that much to human "knowledge." Religion and spiritism have gone to some lengths in the past to silence anyone who gains true knowledge that contradicts whatever religious system is in place. Look at Galileo. Look at Go B trying to disbelieve evolution simply because physical knowledge contradicts his spiritual dogma.

As per free will, I agree that it requires a certain amount of attention as Largo says. Attention actually seems to be a requirement to any understanding of that flood of sensory information. You focus your attention. Then you exercise free will. I'm experiencing free will with every letter I type, right now.

I would bet that meditation sessions are VERY quiet. You need to quiet your chattering mind, which is experiencing at all times. Meditation seems to me to be an attempt to totally de-focus attention, or to absolutely focus on a single thing.

I know a pretty famous AI researcher. He said that understanding intelligence without an examination of subjective experience is almost pointless, and subjective experience is where it gets truly interesting.

I would guess that he has been working towards a "human" form of intelligence. Who knows? There may be many types of intelligence.

Then you can go off into a really interesting area: the creative arts. How do you know if a particular piece of art is good? How do you even define art in the first place? Same goes with writing, basket weaving, you name it. Heavy on subjectivity.

As for free will, I agree that this is probably confined to something that has our "attention." There are an endless number of things that catch our attention, and any of them requiring a decision constitutes free will. I don't narrowly define "attention" like Largo is trying to do.

If your aim is to become a fully realized Buddha, you apparently must spend a lot of time ignoring awareness. Or all of it, anyway.

So far as replicating subjective experience, you first have to understand that experience is NOT an object we can observe and measure in the normal ways. When you say we can replicate subjective experience, you're left with having to write into code awareness, focus and attention, meaning you have to morph experience into the objective. My friends at Caltech gave up on that as an immediate possibility and are now looking at the relationship between the objective and subjective, matter and experience. One is using as a functional metaphor the relationship of gravity and matter, while the other two are not.